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When he was a kid, Panos Cosmatos had a recurring nightmare: He was starring in his favourite Saturday morning TV show, G Force, but it wasn’t a cartoon any more. It was a live action soap opera with tattered costumes and broken props.

“It was all photo-real, but everything looked shitty. It was terrifying. My superpowers didn’t work, and I was in this fantastical universe where everything was supposed to be exciting, but it was just broken and sad.”

Such mind-altering re-interpretations of the everyday are part of growing up, but Cosmatos says he didn’t truly grasp the impulse for escapism or enlightenment until both of his parents were dead.

It was at that moment of existential acceptance that the Vancouver-based director began work on what would become Beyond the Black Rainbow, Cosmatos’s debut feature that recently screened at New York’s Tribeca Film Festival and inked a U.S. distribution deal with Magnet Releasing.

“It started as a germ to do a low-budget black and white movie about a girl in an institute, because I thought I could do it cheaply, but it never really clicked in my mind. It didn’t really spark for me until my dad passed away, and for a period of time, I became really nostalgic about the past and the early ’80s, when my family and I first moved to Canada.”

Born to an experimental artist from Sweden and the Greek film director George Cosmatos (Otto Preminger’s assistant director on Exodus, as well as the director of Rambo: First Blood Part II), young Panos was raised trotting the globe.

Eventually, the boho clan landed in Victoria, where Cosmatos perfected his ability to create fantasies in his mind.

“[When we moved to Victoria] it was the first time I’d been in a video store. I loved going in, but my parents wouldn’t let me watch the R-rated movies, so I’d just read the back of the box and imagine what it was like. It was at that point I really fell in love with the idea of the imagined movie — a movie that only exists in my head.”

Beyond the Black Rainbow was spawned by those hours Cosmatos spent poring over the worn cardboard boxes, and you can see it in every strand of well-shellacked hair as he tells a dystopian tale of a young woman terrorized by a scientist.

“I just wanted to tell a simple story. I started writing it the year after my dad died, so around 2006. But my mum died in 1997, and without realizing it, I had drifted into a slow motion mode of self-destruction and binge drinking – and not dealing with my mother’s death at all,” he says.

“So when my dad died, I realized that would probably compound it, and maybe destroy me. That’s when I started going to therapy to deal with my grief and it gave me clarity for the first time in probably 10 years. That’s when I realized I needed to make a movie right away or I may never make one,” says Cosmatos, 38. “It lit a fire under my ass.”

Within weeks of facing his pain, the aspiring director-writer was hard at work in Vancouver. First he needed to put the script in shape. Second, he needed a creative team.

“The whole thing was put together in a stream of consciousness way. I was dealing with the grief and regret of losing my parents in some strange abstracted way,” he says. “I was also looking at the ‘80s, and what happened to the baby-boomer generation and its connection to the ’60s, because there is a connection there.”

The script pulled in just enough production support to move forward, but even then, Cosmatos says it was a struggle to realize the larger vision.

“I went past delusional. I turned off the whole part of my brain that said it can’t be done,” he says.

“I literally had production designers laugh in my face. They told me we could never achieve what I wanted on the budget that we had.”

Cosmatos didn’t give up and eventually found Bob Bottieri, a veteran who worked in the art department for New Moon and the disaster flick, 2012.

On little more than a shoestring, Bottieri and the crew fabricated a complete universe in a small sound stage with a bad junction box.

“It was a battle to keep it looking good,” says Cosmatos. “But everyone was working toward the same goal.”

When they finally wrapped, Cosmatos figured he had a reel that would be feted at festivals, but that never panned out. Toronto rejected it last year, and so did several other high- profile fantasy festivals.

Cosmatos says Tribeca finally validated the film’s existence with an invitation to Lower Manhattan, as well as a subsequent a distribution deal in the U.S. and Canada.

“I had started to lose hope that any festival would help us. I thought the film would languish, and that no one would ever understand it,” says Cosmatos, laughing with a hint of self-deprecation.

And yet, it did succeed. People are relating to it as it makes its way into art house theatres across North America. Cosmatos should feel good about the trajectory for his creative capsule.

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